The man, Brandon Cory Lecroy, 26, of Greenwood, was arrested in 2018 after a confidential source tipped off authorities that Lecroy had reached out to an unidentified white supremacist organization seeking help in the murder.
An FBI agent posing as a hit man contacted Lecroy, who told the agent over the phone, “$500 and he’s a ghost,” according to an arrest warrant affidavit. After giving the agent an initial payment of $100, he was taken into custody.
Lecroy received the maximum 10-year sentence and three years of court-ordered supervision Friday after pleading guilty to a murder-for-hire charge, the U.S. attorney’s office in South Carolina said in a statement.
The attempted killing came as hate crimes are on the rise. In 2018, the FBI said that reports of such crimes had increased 17% from 2016-17. That was the third straight year they had risen as issues of race increasingly dominated the political climate.
The primary motivators in hate crimes are race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation, the FBI said in its 2018 report. Reporting hate crimes to the FBI is still voluntary for law enforcement agencies, and in 2017, only 12.6% of federal agencies reported that a hate crime had occurred in their jurisdiction.
In Lecroy’s case, officials said they were tipped off in March 2018 that he had contacted the white supremacist group for help with the killing.
Lecroy went as far as texting the agent photos of two targets, including the neighbor, whom officials have not identified. He also provided times when it would have been best to carry out the killing.
Lecroy said he planned to take over his neighbor’s property, according to an affidavit in U.S. District Court in South Carolina. He also asked the agent for a “ghost gun,” or an untraceable 9 mm gun that had not been stolen, according to court documents. What Lecroy planned to do with the “ghost gun” was not disclosed.
After initially pleading not guilty, Lecroy withdrew his plea and pleaded guilty to one count of murder for hire.
Victims of hate crimes often do not believe that reporting their crime will help their situation, and that contributes to why many hate crimes remain unreported.
In 2018, the FBI said it planned to train its agents to be better at identifying and reporting hate crimes. The Justice Department has also set up a website that focuses on education and prevention of hate crimes and providing resources for victims, citizens and officials.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.